Texturing was a target for 2022 but got dropped, other than some initial discussions. For this year Ton likewise said it will not be worked on - why? The staffed projects are all for enhancing existing mature functionality while the texture system is fundamentally broken, obsolete and immediately crashes if you do anything in it. Baking is likewise so old and buggy as to be practically unusable (it always hangs on me)
Puzzling is that if you think about the ‘bang for your buck’ or feature payback for developer time, yes enhancing animation or EEVEE is good, but when texturing is basically a hole in the Blender feature set, it seems that the benefit to staffing that will give a greater payback.
Appreciate any insight into the status of texturing.
While i have no more insight how the BF decides what to work on than you do, you are making a bit of a logical mistake here, devs are not a universal resource, some work on some things others work on other things (the same way your eye doctor and GP are different people, going “they are all doctors come fix my broken leg” wouldn’t work out well super well for your leg)
Ultimately it is indeed a resource problem, there’s only a few devs that could pull off a project of this size and they are allocated elsewhere, but it’s not quite as straight forward as, “ahhhh just take the animation/VSE/Greace Pencil/Sculpting devs and make 'm work on textures”
You should report those as bug. While the texture system is a bit clumsy it never crashes for me. If it would ‘immediately crash’ as soon as you used it a lot more people would complain.
Also baking is slower than it could be and baking from one object to another is sometimes a bit of a hassle , but it does normally work.
Baking not working in my experience is 99% of the time caused by bad UV maps. Especially overlapping uvs tend to screw up baking.
So while I agree that texturing and especially baking could use some love and optimisation I think you are a tad overdramatic here. or you have bad luck in running into bugs…